[khentiamentiu]

I have been unable to get the irq 11 interrupt storm to go away on my laptop. I in general like the atheros chipset cards, use them all the time with my old Linux laptops, not problem, and they worked find with FreeBSD until I decided to upgrade past 7.0. Not the irq11 interrupts lock up my system every time. I have a compaq armada e500 for this configuration, but I doubt that the laptop has anything to do with it.

Anyway, I installed PC-BSD 7.1.1 (based on FreeBSD 7.2-Stable) without a hitch. I don't know what they did, didn't find anything obvious in config files like rc.conf, but it works great. If you have to have FreeBSD but are not a purist about where the directories are, try PC-BSD. Otherwise, I'd recommend netbsd or openbsd. I didn't have that problem there.